On Wed, May 05, 2021 at 01:08:35PM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote: > On 5/5/21 2:30 AM, Rick Edgecombe wrote: > > Why use PKS for this? > > ===================== > > PKS is an upcoming CPU feature that allows supervisor virtual memory > > permissions to be changed without flushing the TLB, like PKU does for user > > memory. Protecting page tables would normally be really expensive because you > > would have to do it with paging itself. PKS helps by providing a way to toggle > > the writability of the page tables with just a per-cpu MSR. > > I can see in patch 8/9 that you are flipping the MSR around individual > operations on page table entries. In my patch I hooked making the page table > writable to obtaining the page table lock (IIRC I had only the PTE level fully > handled though). Wonder if that would be better tradeoff even for your MSR approach? There's also the HIGHPTE code we could abuse to kmap an alias while we're at it.
